May 24th, 2016
This week, after some work trying to connect our flora accelerometer to our arduino nano board we found out that our board is not compatible with our accelerometer. We decided to use the adafruit flora board with the acceleromter to see what kind of data we can gather from that. We connected the accelerometer to the adafruit using conductive thread and tried it out. We experienced several technicalities because when we plugged the adafruit in to the desktop, the board was not showing up. We tried all the different com ports and checked the device manager but the board would not show up. Mr. Loggie advised us to try reinstalling arduino to see if the board would show up after and we left off by installing the software. Also last week we wont on thingiverse asnd found a baseball that was the exact size that we needed and 3D printed a prototype baseball on both of our printers, the Orion and the Ditto pro but only the Ditto Pro came out succesful. We adjusted the baseball using tinkercad so we could open and close the baseball. We decided to go with the idea of a plug to put in the baseball so we tried to print it on the Orion printer. We added a support for the bottom of the print which turned out to be a mistake as we couldnt detach it without breaking the baseball because of the tough filament the Orion forms because of its heated bed.
May 13th, 2016
This week we worked on the code on arduino for hooking our flora accelerometer and HC-06 Bluetooth module up to our board. We looked up which code to use for our accelerometer and set it up on Arduino but it was unsuccessful because there was an error with the code. We figured out that we needed to download a few libraries that needed to be included in the code for it to work. Once we downloaded the files off Github, we included the files in our code and it came out successful. We then started to work on the setup for connecting our bluetooth module to the Arduino Nano. We found a setup online that would work with our bluetooth module and board. After we started to wire it up we realized that we would need a three way conncetion with two females and a male. With the help of Mr. Hallihan, we soltered the two females and male together. After this was complete we finished up the connection to our bluetooth module and got it working. Next we downloaded a bluetooth terminal emulator called PuTTY which we are going to use to transmit data for testing with our accelerometer. We also started connecting our board to our accelerometer using conductive thread at the end of the week.
May 4th, 2016
Over the last two weeks we used the Redbot SIK to test our new Arduino Nano board to light up LED's. We recieve the new board last week from Roboshop and spent some time researching the Arduino Nano and how to use it. We had some problems because there were a couple different set ups that we could use and the first one that we used wasnt the right one so we tried the other one and it worked. We hooked up our Nano to a bread board using two wires and also set up an LED on the bread board. We used a Netbook because only a couple of the laptops in the class have the Arduino program and the Netbook was quite slow. We could not use Arduino and research how to test the board at the same time because the internet was too slow. Eventually we switched to the desktop and TV instead of the laptop. We got Arduino working and uploaded the code for lighting an LED and our test was successful. We also tested out our bluetooth module by using wires to connect them to our Arduino board. I also downloaded a terminal emulator app on an old android phone i had and connected it to the bluetooth module and the connection seemed to be very good. Since all our gear is working well, we should began the process of starting to build the first prototype for our bluetooth baseball.
April 22nd, 2016
This week we came up with the idea of making a "Bluetooth Baseball" where we will be able to see how fast the ball is travelling when we throw it. We will do this by inserting an accelerometer and bluetooth module into the baseball. The baseball can be programmed using an arduino nano board to relay data, gathered by the accelerometer, back to a computer using our bluetooth. We plan to take this further so we can relay the data from the accelerometer to our phones using a terminal emulator app so we can read how fast the baseball is travelling, directly off our phones. We would like to set the program With the help of Dylan and James we ordered the pieces neccessary to make it happen. At first we want to 3D print a baseball and if that works we will actually use a real baseball by drilling holes in the middle and placing the Bluetooth module and accelerometer and then filling our hole back in. The way that we will be able to see the number of how fast the ball is travelling is through an app that we will begin working on after we succesfully make a few "BLuetooth Baseballs". If we could create an app, we would like to add features to it so speeds of different pitches can be recorded in categories and average speeds can be tracked. We have or have ordered all the parts required to start our build. We are very excited to learn about arduino and try to build our first prototype of the Bluetooth Baseball.